Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomlockwood | Hacker News Reader

Yeah given paulg's tweets I'm wondering if our free speech absolutist view as a website, actually holds here.

I always found HN much more VCist than free speech. any comment criticizing plutocrats tends to get downvoted

I assure you that HN has at least as many comments (actually far more) dissing VCs and plutocrats.

Your comment may be suffering from the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We're all more likely to notice shit we dislike.

Well HN is run by plutocrats. Who pay a lot of money to run the site. I’d rather have HN with this obvious bias than no HN at all.

This doesn't feel like an expensive site to host/develop, but the moderation costs might be up there.

It probably IS expensive to host because it’s written in a language no one uses without an optimizing compiler, and apprently most of the “db” is flatfiles on disk, some of which get read on every request.

Computers are fast. This isn't a particularly demanding workload; pages for users that aren't logged in are cached, and there probably aren't a ton of people logged in.

Last time I looked, Let's Encrypt had one big beefy Postgres database to issue pretty much every single TLS certificate on the Internet. Computers are fast.

You vastly underestimate how much impact ONE server can make if you don't use modern cloud garbage tech

its hosted on a single random server, so no, in absolute terms it very unlikely is expensive. (or two actually, since there is a backup server afaik)

HN isn't that expensive to host. We have two servers at a colo and various backups to S3.

Now you’re getting somewhere. At this point HN has hundreds of undocumented features and isn’t the technical cakewalk you think but sure, factor out the tech part. Just do the math on moderation costs vs. revenue generated by text-only ads with zero visual distinction.

Moderation as good as HN would require at least 3 costly staffers, fully loaded cost something like $30K-$250K each, fully loaded depending on where they live.

If doing HN were easy there would be a dozen awesome competitors.

You are wrong on so many levels. HN IS the ad. The whole point of HN is to push VC narratives and "Greed is good" style things onto nerds and less-nerdy but more business hungry folks. It's not meant to generate any revenue at all, it's a marketing funnel.

Moderation is pretty much JUST dang.

HN DOES have competitors, lobste.rs is pretty much directly competing, and more importantly, this very concept of "simple board to post links and comment" was borrowed to build freaking REDDIT

I know it might be hard to believe, but I assure you it's not the point of HN to push "VC narratives" or "greed is good". The strategy is much simpler and has a bunch of nice properties, one being that it works even better if you tell people what it is. It's simply to keep the community interested and happy. That's not easy, but it's the way to maximize HN's value—even if you look at it in the most self-interested way from YC's point of view.

I've written a bunch about this in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you (or anyone) read those explanations and end up still having a question which I haven't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.

Reddit predates HN by two years

You're right, but mrguyorama isn't wrong either since the same person came up with both ideas. They just had the time arrow reversed.

I've seen plenty such upvoted comments. By and large, what matters is the tone of criticism.

dang has done a phenomenal job at moderating this site, and I trust his judgement. It is heavily moderated, and that's a good thing to keep it focused. Too much twitter drama would be lame. But this feels like an important moment.

I generally agree, but I also think that a certain subset of political beliefs get upvoted here that creates a real echo chamber, and that there's this idea of a "middle path" rationality that is assumed, but doesn't actually exist. It's a class of problem I think could be classified as a "I don't have an accent" problem. I wrote to dang directly about this, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30252817

I think there's probably a certain class of articles, critical of paulg and hn and the hn community's "accent" that get flagged and downvoted here, by people and moderators. And, a certain class of articles that always get uncritically upvoted.

In my experience, you can post stuff that's politically as far left as it gets, so long as you phrase it politely.

I am deeply concerned that only one person is holding this ship on course, and that person's time is running out.

IIRC there’s more than one mod but dang is the most visible. sctb used to be another mod but it looks like he left in 2019.

It is?

(well I guess everyone's is)

Turn showdead in and tell me this website is a “free speech absolutist zone”.

I mean, subjectively most of those accounts deserve to be dead, but don’t pretend this is something it isn’t.

Unfortunately, hypocrisy is possible.

One interesting thing I heard recently was this idea that even in communities of the most rusted on free speech absolutists, there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?

It's totally possible to believe that unrestricted free speech is the best policy and to also not implement that policy.

> there's still a recognition that spam and flooding are not acceptable - and the question is, why?

Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them. Generally free speech maximalism is about allowing all controversial speech for various reasons which tend to include the importance of dissenting voices.

>...Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant,

Free Speech absolutist don't put any concern the listener may have on the content, but the fact that the speaker is being prevented from distributing their message. Not to mention, one of the points cited by free speech absolutists is "who determines facts/truth/value" and who determines the entity who gets to do that. That means you can't make a judgement value about the spam being spam and have to treat it as something SOMEONE somewhere might desire.

> Flooding and spamming are hated by everyone and are otherwise unimportant, there's no controversy about them.

I'm pretty sure, looking at twitch chat, that this isn't universally true.

Then the next question is, if this supposed truism isn't universally true, what other moderation decisions and flagging, aren't?

It's not that simple. A lot of censorship happens under the guise of "removing spam". For example, dang regularly censors HN comments promoting viewpoints he doesn't like by claiming that they are "flamebait" or similar, which is to say, if enough people dislike something then it is spam.

Doing it right requires the intellectual honesty to draw a line between these two comments: "lol hitler did nothing wrong gas the **s! 1488 woo!" and "Hitler did nothing but implement some social control policies which would be widely accepted in today's society, if presented differently."

I obviously don't agree with either sentence. But the second one should be permitted and vouched against downvotes while the first can be deleted without a second thought. Honesty required.

"Let me turn on the built in way to see all the comments to prove that they don't support free speech!"

Hiding comments from 99.5% of users is functionally the same as deleting them.

HN is definitely not a free speech zone. It doesn't need to be, and I think they let a lot of legitimate discussions take place, but in no way shape or form is this a free speech discussion forum, it's a business (a I personally think a decently run one, as for moderation is very difficult).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com